Introduction
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I am very pleased to be publishing the third series of customer satisfaction research results. This summary details the results of telephone interviews, conducted on our behalf by an independent research company, with a sample of our customers between May 2010 and April 2011.
The primary role of my Office is to consider complaints of unfair treatment or poor service, and to put things right where we can. Making judgments on the quality of services provided by others of course means that we ourselves have to strive to achieve the highest standard of customer service.
I am pleased that the results of this latest customer satisfaction research confirm that we are continuing to attain this. The research results show that the majority of our customers have rated our customer service favourably in most respects throughout 2010-11. This reflects the efficiency, approachability and high quality of our communications.
One of our strategic objectives is to deliver a high quality and accessible complaint handling service. We use the results of our customer satisfaction research to measure our success in achieving this objective, and to ascertain how far we fulfil the expectations our customers have of the service we provide. The levels of customer satisfaction demonstrate that we are continuing to meet this objective.
Nevertheless, some of our customers continue to be critical about their experience with our office and do not have confidence in our ability to handle their complaint. To some extent this is inevitable: the nature of our work means that there will always be people who are unhappy with the outcome of their complaint. However, we remain committed to maintaining the highest quality of customer service, and endeavour to communicate our reasons for the final decisions (which may inevitably disappoint), in a timely and efficient manner.
In particular, we understand that we need to demonstrate more clearly how we add value even when we decide not to undertake a formal investigation into a complaint. You can find a short description of the different ways we help our customers in our Annual Report 2010-11.
We have also set ourselves rigorous standards for the timeliness of our response. It has been encouraging to see how a faster service has gone hand in hand with improvements in our customer satisfaction scores in 2010-11. Whilst our first objective will always be to maintain the high quality of our casework, we will continue to work to deliver faster resolution to enquiries and investigations, recognising that, for many of our customers, coming to us is the final step in a lengthy and protracted complaints process.
If you have recently made a complaint to us, or are thinking of bringing a complaint, I hope this research summary will provide a useful snapshot of the experiences of some of our recent customers. We are grateful to all those who have participated in the research: as a result of your feedback we are able to improve the service we offer to everyone.
Ann Abraham
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
